I have read some references about philosophy (hmmm, I'm getting a bit hooked up on this!), and here I will summarize what I have learned. The first chapter of a book by Tomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein introduced the theme of the book, which is, of course, philosophy.
I learned that in philosophy, questions beget questions, and the questions beget even more questions. And these questions beget yet a whole generation of questions. Well, I realized that's the whole idea of philosophy, finding answers naturally, rather than just a cooked up story (supernatural, in other words).
According to Aristotle, everything as a telos, which is an inner goal it was meant to obtain. An acorn has a telos: An oak tree. Birds have one, bees have one. Actually when I first read about this small subject it sounded a little abstract to me. But when I read a joke about this, it became clearer:
Mrs. Goldenstein was walking down the street with her two grandchildren. A friend stopped her to ask her how old they were. She said, "The doctor is five and the lawyer is seven."
What does this mean? I mean, the hidden meaning behind it? I was thinking about this joke when I read it on my ipod. Then I thought about the telos. What do you think?
Does human life have a telos? I was thinking about this. Well anyway Aristotle thought so. He thought the telos of human life is happiness, but this was much disputed by other philosophers throughout human history. St. Augustine thought the telos of life is to love god. Martin Heidegger (a tentalist, actually) thought the true telos of human life is to live without the denial of the true human conditions, especially Death. Well this is a rather challenging starting topic huh? What haveYOUgot to say to this?
- The HM
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
I have read, learned, and now I will summarize
Posted by Caspar Zhou at 2/23/2010 04:55:00 PM
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2 comments:
Hahaha :P
Well I totally agree that telos depends on someone's POV.
Like, if somebody's passion lies in say...studying, then he or she may want to have a telos: E.g. to teach
Especially at the last part of your blog post, it is evident that different people have different telos. Like priests have telos about God, etc.
In life, we should have telos (much like a goal), as this sets a standard for ourselves, so we will not underperform, and do the best in whatever we can! :D
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Ian Wong:
Ian I really appreciate your comment (I will definitely visit your blog), and I also appreciate your understanding of mny post, not like Bryan (e.g. uh...my head is spinning already...).
Well what do you think about the telos of life? You have made the point of setting a standard in life (well philosophically its not really true. Its an inner goal, like what you're naturally supposed to do), but what do you think about Heidegger's thought about the telos of life?
Clarify: Heidegger thought that the telos of life was to live without the denial of the true human conditions, especially Death. That's actually quite an interesting topic, don't you think?
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